Work Text:
(703):To this day, he introduces me as "the girl I met climbing trees at 3 A.M." + (936):the paramedic just looked at me like "you again?"
Derek sighs when he spots him, deep disappointment etched into the crease between his eyebrows. “You again?” he says, although his tone is completely free of surprise, like he’d already expected to find Stiles.
Stiles lets out a pitiful whimper which is only, like, ten percent for dramatic effect and to evoke Derek’s sympathy, and ninety percent actual pain and agony, because his leg really fucking hurts. “It took you long enough,” he gripes as Derek squats down next to him. “I’m dying.” He sniffs for good measure.
Derek adjusts his glasses--he’s in glasses tonight, and Stiles is in too much pain to acknowledge and admire it to full extent--looks Stiles up and down. “You being a petulant little shit tells me you’re nowhere near dying,” he simpers, and Stiles would be outraged if it wasn’t for the stupid crinkles around Derek’s eyes. “What happened?”
“The ground was in my way,” Stiles says, matches Derek’s lifted eyebrows with a little shrug.
“As usual,” Derek muses, little smirk curling at the corners of his mouth, and starts patting down Stiles’ leg gently. “What were you doing?”
“Pole-dancing. Or, in this case, tree-dancing.”
Derek levels him with a flat look. “Do you even have the necessary brain-limb-coordination for dancing?”
“Ha ha.” Stiles sneers, and hisses when Derek reaches his ankle, touching it with gentle, dexterous fingers. “I have you know I am a great dancer.”
“You also told me you knew your way around mushrooms when I brought you in after you poisoned yourself with toadstools,” Derek points out, unimpressed, while he finishes his superficial examination.
Stiles is sure no amount of verbal and non-verbal communication can get across his indignation, because he does know his way around stupid fungi; it was an accident when he mixed up a poisonous mushroom with a non-poisonous one. It’s not his fault that they look so much alike. “It was one time!”
Derek asks him if he should get the gurney, but Stiles waves him off. He has a broken ankle, not a spine fracture (luckily); he does, however, swat Derek’s hands away when he wants to stabilize Stiles after helping him get up. Turns out jumping towards the ambulance on one leg is way harder than he thought. He makes grabby hands at Derek, pathetically, and Derek smirks walking up to him, but wraps an arm around him wordlessly, and they make it to the car without problems.
Derek sits him down inside, goes on to stabilize his ankle, while his partner starts the car. “I’m just glad you never told me you were great using your brain, because going by your actual success rate, you’d be probably brain damaged by now,” Derek says.
“This is probably the sweetest thing you have ever said to me,” Stiles admits, leans back to admire the way Derek looks when he works. “Insult included.”
Derek’s smirk turns into a small, soft smile that he hides by ducking his head. “How’s the pain?” he asks then, checks the stabilizing orthosis he put on Stiles’ ankle.
“It’s okay,” Stiles says after a moment. Derek distracted him, and now the pain is a persistent ache, still there, but manageable. He juts his bottom lip out, though. “But I got nobody to kiss it better.”
Derek stares at him, at his mouth, more specifically, and Stiles feels his heart flutter in excitement. He licks his lips deliberately, watches Derek trace the motion with his eyes, and can’t keep the satisfied smirk off his face. Derek’s eyes snap up to meet his, before he averts his gaze completely, ears pinking up slightly.
“You do know that it’s not actually a medical treatment, right?” Derek busies himself by doing a quick general check-up on Stiles.
“Miracles happen,” Stiles says, remembers how his mom used to kiss his little injuries better, and yeah, it never took away the pain, but the sentiment was soothing.
“That you’re still alive is a miracle,” Derek quips, back to normal, and Stiles flips him off half-heartedly.
Once they reach the hospital, they get him a wheel chair, wheel him into the ER for further treatment. Derek recites his stats to a resident who introduces himself as Dr. Boyd. (Derek laughs hysterically for a minute straight; it leaves Stiles a little dazed.)
“You the guy climbing trees at 3 a.m.?” Boyd asks, and Stiles shoots Derek a glare.
“It was one time!”
“It’s three-fifty,” Dr. Boyd says without any inflection in his voice as he wheels Stiles away. “What were you doing up in a tree at this time of day?”
Derek’s still keeping up with them, even though Stiles is pretty sure his services aren’t required anymore; that this isn’t even his area of expertise. It’s kind of--grounding, soothing, that Derek sticks around. There’s probably a bunch of other stuff he could rather be doing, but he’s still here, still keeping him company. Stiles feels warmth spread through his chest.
“Stargazing,” he finally admits, slumps a little in the chair. “I used to do it with my mom, up in trees, and I couldn’t sleep, so--.”
Dr. Boyd doesn’t even bother replying. Instead, he wheels him into the x-ray room, gets him prepped to take the picture. Exhaustion spreads through Stiles’ body like wildfire suddenly, limbs heavy, eyes drooping. Dr. Boyd leaves the room after instructing him to stay still, and Derek’s gone too, leaving Stiles completely alone. The silence stretches on until the x-ray machine whirs to live; the familiar clicking the only thing that keeps Stiles awake.
Dr. Boyd comes back, wheels him back into the ER and dumps him on a bed before he disappears again, leaving Stiles to sulk for himself. It doesn’t seem to be a very busy night: most beds are empty, barely any staff around, and the nurse behind the admission counter looks sleepy and bored. Derek’s nowhere to be seen either. The odd sensation swamping his body is disappointment Stiles realizes. He stares at the clock across the room, follows the second hand around the face, watches the minute hand jump once the sixty seconds are up.
He should probably call someone, his dad, or Scott, but the painkillers Derek gave him earlier make him weary; he doesn’t want to be alone, though. The white hospital walls are glaring and dull, seeming to numb Stiles’ perceptibility to everything else.
Derek appears by his side, eyebrows drawn together in a frown. He sits down next to Stiles’ bed, looking worried.
“How are you doing?” he asks, and Stiles very deliberately doesn’t think about smoothing out the crease between Derek’s brows with his fingertips.
“‘m fine,” Stiles answers, musters a small smile, though it never reaches his eyes. “Don’t you have something better to do than hold my hand?”
Derek’s mouth quirks ever so slightly, and his eyes flick from Stiles’ face down to his hands, and up again. “I’m not holding your hand,” he points out, before he carefully grabs Stiles’ hand, wraps warm fingers around it, grip firm. “Now I am.”
It’s hard to pay attention to anything other than that: the point of connection; the way Derek holding his hand feels, like it ignites a wildfire all up his arm that spreads and spreads and spreads until Stiles is pretty sure his heart’s on fire too from beating way too fast. Derek draws tiny circles onto Stiles’ skin with his thumb, and it settles something restless inside him, soothes the anxiety.
“Do you want me to call someone?” Derek asks, and Stiles almost misses it, too fixated on their joined hands.
He blinks up at Derek. “Um,” he starts, very eloquently, “no, it’s okay, uh--” His gaze drops back down to their hands. Stiles has imagined himself with Derek a lot of times: thought about hot, wet kisses; sloppy blowjobs traded in the back of an ambulance; stealing Derek away into some on-call room to have messy, dirty sex with him. He never let himself envision more than that, though sometimes his thoughts have strayed, leaving him picturing lazy days, family dinners, possible anniversaries; and nothing he ever came up with, nothing he ever thought he’d feel, is what it’s like to hold Derek’s hand.
It’s endlessly better.
Dr. Boyd comes back a little while later, x-ray photos in hand, effectively distracting Stiles from admiring how his hand fits perfectly into Derek’s, and how possibly other...organs might fit perfectly together too. Dr. Boyd sticks the photos up the white board, flicks on the light. Stiles sees where his bone is broken, but Dr. Boyd explains it to him anyway, tells him the treatment plan, and it’s not much as it turns out. It’s a simple and clean enough break that only requires a cast for four weeks.
“I’ll wait here,” Derek tells him, before Dr. Boyd wheels Stiles away again.
Dr. Boyd releases him, saying, “Don’t climb any more trees at three in the morning unless it’s under supervision.”
Stiles doesn’t even have time to sneer at him, because the doctor is already walking away. He turns to Derek, who--as promised--waited for him in the ER, and narrow his eyes at him.
“Hey, how did he even know about me?” he asks Derek, who suddenly is very busy picking at a seam of his shirt, avoiding eye contact.
“I may have told him about how we first met,” Derek admits, looking up to meet Stiles’ gaze.
“That’s--that was almost a year ago,” Stiles says, furrowing his brows in confusion. “Is his memory that good?”
Derek’s colouring delicately now, though he keeps looking at Stiles steadily, expression unwavering. There’s a softness around his mouth, and Stiles wants to know how it feels kissing him.
“I may have talked about you a little, sometimes. Like, when you found out you’re allergic to bee stings after you--”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember, no need to revisit...that,” Stiles throws in hastily, because that wasn’t his finest moment. He’d been near death and had clung to Derek like he was a life jacket. It was embarrassing; pretty great in terms of hugging all the glory that is Derek, but embarrassing nonetheless.
“I think I drove everyone in my vicinity crazy with it,” Derek says, eyes crinkling as he smiles at him: a shy curl of his lips that still manages to to brighten up the room somehow.
Stiles answers with a smile of his own, a bubbly feeling washing over him like a wave, and it leaves him excited for--something. “Yeah,” he manages, bites his lip thinking back to all the times he waxed poetic about his hot EMT. Scott actually has a video of him drunkenly reciting some Shakespeare sonnet to Derek; Derek can never find out. “I think Scott can’t stand to hear anything more about you, either.”
They sit like that for a moment, beaming at each other like lovestruck idiots, but Stiles can’t help himself, honestly; he could stare at Derek smiling all day. It’s a beautiful sight.
“So--” Stiles starts, stopping short.
Derek’s eyes are intent. “So?”
Go out with me. Kiss me. Love me.
“I guess I should call Scott.”
Derek’s face falls a little, and Stiles winces inwardly, curses his treacherous brain for betraying him like that. He fumbles with his phone, avoids looking at Derek, because seeing him disappointed makes his heart ache.
When Scott sighs down the line, it’s like Stiles can hear the echo for another five minutes. “You sure you’re okay?” he asks, voice sleep-rough, but concern still colouring the tone.
“It’s just a broken ankle, Scott, I’m fine,” Stiles says, watching Derek frown at his own phone. “I just need a ride home.”
Scott makes a noise. “I will never leave you out of my sight again. The day will come you break your neck while peeing.”
“Well, it’s not like we have any boundaries left, so I guess I can live with that,” Stiles answers. He snickers when Scott groans.
“He’ll be here in fifteen,” Stiles tells Derek as soon as he hangs up, and Derek lifts his eyes from his phone, tucks it away.
“Okay.” Derek gives him another smile, a warm, beautiful smile that melts Stiles’ core. “Let me get you some crutches.”
When Derek comes back a couple of minutes later, handing over the crutches, Stiles sucks in a breath. “Maybe we should go out sometime. Accident-free.”
Derek smirks. “You can do accident-free?”
Stiles scratches a spot under his chin, scrunches up his nose. “I’d have to give it a try,” he muses, hefts himself up with the crutches. “Maybe start with something easy. Like dinner.”
“What does it say about our relationship that I just came up with all the possible hazards during dinner?” Derek answers as he pushes his glasses up his nose; smirks when Stiles punches his arm playfully.
“It means maybe I’ll fake-choke on something, so you have to give me mouth-to-mouth.”
“If you choked on something, the first thing I’d do--”
“Oh god,” Stiles groans, almost throws his hands up, but remembers in the last moment that he’s attached to crutches. “Why do you have to rain on my parade?”
Derek smirks at him wordlessly, walks Stiles to the exit of the ER. It’s dawning outside, air sweet and fresh.
“So,” Derek says, smoothes out the collar of Stiles’ shirt. “How about I cook for you, tomorrow, at your place? If you wa--”
“Yes,” Stiles says, maybe a little too fast, a little too eagerly, but Derek sends him a blinding smile that turns Stiles’ bones to goo, and he knows it was just right. “Sounds perfect.”
Derek gets out a pen, bends down, and scrawls his number across Stiles’ cast. He draws a little tree next to it with a stick figure hanging from one of the branches. Stiles tries to be indignant about it, except it’s probably one of the cutest things he’s ever seen.
“I can’t wait,” Derek admits quietly when he stands again.
Scott’s car turns into the driveway.
“Yeah, me too,” Stiles says, swaying a little. They’re close, he could probably kiss Derek right now, but--maybe it’s too early for that. Maybe he should wait.
“See you then.”
“Yeah.”
Derek gives him one last smile, before he turns away, walking back into the ER, and Stiles looks over at the car drawing nearer.
“Stiles.”
He’s barely turned back around when Derek’s hands frame his face, cradling it gently, and Derek’s lips seal over his. Derek kisses him like nobody’s business, all tongue and teeth, nipping at his bottom lip; kisses him so fiercely Stiles is pretty sure he feels it in his toes. It sends tiny shocks through him when their tongues touch, and Stiles makes these tiny, breathless noises at the back of his throat that should be mortifying, but Derek swallows them all; lips curling in a smile against Stiles’.
Stiles is breathless by the time Derek pulls away, a satisfied smile spreading across his face. His thumbs trace the skin under Stiles’ eyes.
“Better?” Derek asks.
Stiles nods. “Yeah,” he croaks, as his brain scrambles to process everything that’s just happened; process the kiss that’s probably ruined him already for anyone else but Derek.
Derek’s smile widens, grows a tiny bit smug. “Good.”